What happens to a dream deferred?
       Does it dry up
       like a raisin in the sun?
       Or fester like a sore-
       And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over-
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?



Langston Hughes Tribute at Howard University

http://www.soaw.org/new/

PROTEST

The School of the Americas

http://www.soaw.org/new

Converge on Fort Benning: November 17-19, 2006
Commemorate the Victims and Celebrate the Resistance

This November 17-19, civil rights movement leaders, torture survivors, grandmothers, war veterans, faith communities, union organizers, families, puppeteers and social justice activists from across the Americas will converge on Fort Benning, Georgia, to speak out against the SOA/WHINSEC and to change oppressive U.S. foreign policy. At the same time, social movement activists will gather in Central and South America, calling for an end to U.S. intervention and the closure of the SOA/WHINSEC. Together, and in numbers too big to be ignored, we will take a stand for justice, peace and accountability and against the racist system of violence and domination that is represented by the SOA/WHINSEC. Repressive militaries are not the answer to the problems of our day and age.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld —

�So long as our government requires the backing of an aroused and informed public opinion ... it is necessary to tell the hard bruising truth.�

That statement was written by Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Marguerite Higgins more than a half-century ago during the Korean War.

But until recently, the �hard bruising� truth about the Iraq war has been difficult to come by from leaders in Washington.

One rosy reassurance after another has been handed down by President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: �mission accomplished,� the insurgency is �in its last throes,� and �back off,� we know what we�re doing, are a few choice examples.

Military leaders generally toed the line, although a few retired generals eventually spoke out from the safety of the sidelines, inciting criticism equally from anti-war types, who thought they should have spoken out while still in uniform, and pro-war foes, who thought the generals should have kept their critiques behind closed doors.

Turkish: %$#@#!* BUSH

Yet they call Kerry a traitor.

Center for war-related brain injuries faces budget cut

“Honestly, they would have loved to have funded it, but there were just so many priorities,” says Jenny Manley, spokeswoman for the Senate Appropriations Committee. “They didn’t have any flexibility in such a tight fiscal year.”

George Zitnay, co-founder of the center, testified before a Senate subcommittee in May that body armor saves troops caught in blasts but leaves many with brain damage. “Traumatic brain injury is the signature injury of the war on terrorism,” he testified.

Zitnay asked for $19 million, and 34 Democratic and six Republican members of Congress signed a letter endorsing the budget request.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-08-08-brain-center_x.htm

WWW.AWOLBUSH.COM

Death Squad Specialist John Negroponte

I removed more checks and balances and have the least congressional oversight of any presidential administration in US history.

I rendered the entire United Nations irrelevant.

I withdrew from the World Court Of Law.

I refused to allow inspector's access to US prisoners of war and by default no longer abide by the Geneva Conventions.

I am the first president in US history to refuse United Nations elections inspectors access during the 2000 elections.

I am the all-time US record holder for the most corporate campaign donations.

The biggest lifetime contributor to my campaign, who is also one of my best friends, presided over one of the largest corporate bankruptcy frauds in world history (Kenneth Lay, former CEO of EnronCorporation)

I spent more money on polls and focus groups than any president in US history.

I am the first president to run and hide when the US came under attack (and then lied, saying the enemy had the code to Air Force 1).

I am the first US president to establish a secret shadow government.

I took the world’s sympathy for the US after 9/11, and in less than a year made the US the most resented country in the world (possibly the biggest diplomatic failure in US and world history).

I am the first US president in history to have a majority of the people of Europe (71%) view my presidency as the biggest threat to world peace and stability.

I changed US policy to allow convicted criminals to be awarded government contracts.

I set the all-time record for the number of administration appointees who violated US laws by not selling their huge investments in corporations that later made bids for gov. contracts.

I have removed more freedoms and civil liberties for Americans than any other president in US history.

I have created the most divided country in decades, possibly the most divided that the US has been since the Civil War.

I entered office with the strongest economy in US history and in less than two years turned every single economic category heading straight down.

I have at least one conviction for drunk driving in Maine (Texas driving record has been erased and is not available).

I was AWOL from the National Guard and deserted the military during time of war. I refused to take a drug test or even answer any questions about drug use.

All records of my tenure as governor of Texas have been spirited away to my father’s library, sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public view. All records of any SEC investigation into my insider trading or bankrupted companies are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public view.

All minutes of meetings of any public corporations for which I served on the board are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public view. Any records or minutes from meetings I (or my VP) attended regarding public energy policy are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public review

I have borrowed more money from more countries than all other Presidents combined.

http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_7779.shtml

Republican Congressional leaders filed into the Oval Office to meet with President George W. Bush and talk about renewing the controversial USA Patriot Act.

Several provisions of the act, passed in the shell shocked period immediately following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, caused enough anger that liberal groups like the American Civil Liberties Union had joined forces with prominent conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly and Bob Barr to oppose renewal.

GOP leaders told Bush that his hardcore push to renew the more onerous provisions of the act could further alienate conservatives still mad at the President from his botched attempt to nominate White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.

“I don’t give a goddamn,” Bush retorted. “I’m the President and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way.” “Mr. President,” one aide in the meeting said. “There is a valid case that the provisions in this law undermine the Constitution.”

“Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,” 

Bush screamed back. 

“It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”

THE SCHIZOPHRENIA OF AMERICAN MIDDLE EAST POLICY

by Prof. Rodrigue Tremblay

Prowling Baghdad with a sidearm and a defective bulletproof-vest

By Mike Whitney

None of the people who started this war will ever be held accountable. In fact,
the cabal of militarists, think-tank sycophants, and genocidal nutbars, who
operate covertly behind the scenes, are probably devising their next bloodbath
already. Unless we root them out, the cancer will persist. 

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15513.htm

Where Plan A Left Ahmad Chalabi

1. London, August 2006

Many miles away in a more dangerous place the dream is ending badly. The bodies pile up. Good people stream to the borders. Leaders pile money onto planes. The center is giving way.

The apartment on South Street in London is an antidote to Baghdad in nearly every respect. Where the Iraqi capital rings with chaos and violence, the sidewalks of Mayfair are quiet enough to hear your own voice above the cars. Baghdad is treeless and tan; the South Street apartment opens onto a private park filled with the lushness of an English garden. Just across the way is the Anglican church where General Eisenhower, stationed here as the commander of Allied forces during the war, came to pray. A maid greets you at the door, an elderly Lebanese woman who doubles as an Arabic teacher for the children.

The parlor is neatly appointed and filled with art, most of it European, different from the Baghdad house, where most of it is Iraqi. There is “Sketch of a Woman,” by Lucien Pissarro, the French painter who propagated Impressionism in London; it catches the light nicely. The furniture is expensive, the kind that makes you hesitate to sit down. But the place has a lived-in quality too; family members come and go, clutching bags and calling to one another down the hallways. No one seems the least bit awed by the man of the house, who is dressed in a bespoke suit and carries himself like a monarch, and who, until now, hasn’t spent more than a day at a time here since before the Iraq war began.

For Ahmad Chalabi, Iraq is an abstraction again. Once again, his native country is a faraway land ruled by somebody else, a place where other people die. It’s a place to be discussed, rued, plotted over, from a parlor on an expensive Western street. Iraq’s new leaders, the men who excluded Chalabi from the government they formed this spring, still call for advice — several times a day, Chalabi says. He is here in London, his longtime home in exile, temporarily, he says, taking his first vacation in five years. At lunch at a nearby restaurant an hour before, he ordered the sea bass wrapped in a banana leaf. He walks the streets unattended by armed guards.

But the interlude, Chalabi says, is just that, a passing thing. His doubters will come back to him; they always have. As ever, he wears a jester’s smile, wide and blank, a mask that has carried him through crises of the first world and the third. Still, a touch of bitterness can creep into Chalabi’s voice, a hint that he has concluded that his time has come and gone. Indeed, even for a man as vain and resilient as Chalabi, his present predicament stands too large to go unacknowledged. Once Iraq’s anointed leader — anointed by the Americans — Chalabi, at age 62, is without a job, spurned by the very colleagues whose ascension he engineered. His benefactors in the White House and in the Pentagon, who once gobbled up whatever half-baked intelligence Chalabi offered, now regard him as undependable and — worse — safely ignored. Chalabi’s life work, an Iraq liberated from Saddam Hussein, a modern and democratic Iraq, is spiraling toward disintegration. Indeed, for many in the West, Chalabi has become the personification of all that has gone wrong in Iraq: the lies, the arrogance, the occupation as disaster.

New York Times, Nov 5 2006